Portable electronic devices such as laptops, smartphones, tablets, and cameras are popular with consumers. These electronic devices are powered by batteries, or power units. Due to the portable nature of these electronic devices, they are repeated exposed to environmental contaminants more often than electronic devices such as televisions, for example. This repeated exposure of the electronic device to environmental contaminants brings about a commercial desire for the various internal components, such as the power units, to be protected against such contaminants. Some such power units are flexible thin-film micro-batteries for example.
Such flexible thin-film micro-batteries include, in a stacked arrangement, a mica substrate, an active battery layer on the mica substrate, a polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC) layer coating over the active battery layer, and a mica cover over the PVDC layer. While the PVDC and mica cover provide a degree of protection from environmental contaminants, oxygen and water may over time slowly be able to diffuse through the layers of the stacked arrangement and degrade the active battery layer.
Given that degradation of the active battery layer is commercially undesirable, new designs for power units that are more resistant to environmental contaminants, as well as the processes used to produce such power units, are desirable.